Why spend time thinking about a tiny place in the middle of one of
America's most infrequently visited (let alone considered) states? This
Web site purports to provide ample answers to the question. And most of
these answers revolve around the principle that getting to know a
particular place in all its intimate detail is a good and useful thing,
and a process by which one can can gain a great deal of respect for a
landscape and its complex past and present.

In this site, I also aim to examine the relationship between memory
and place. What reverberates in individual and collective memories? And
what do these memories tell us about landscape, architecture and the
intangibles that make up a particular place? In the case of Brainerd,
the memories uncovered also help us better understand why this community
has survived and not faded back into the prairie, unlike so many other
Kansas railroad towns.

To read the rest of this Introduction, scroll down. If you want to
bypass the Introduction completely, feel free to navigate using the
frame at left, after reading some of the navigation tips listed below.

Kansas and The Prairie Plains

Getting acquainted with
the Prairie Plains landscape encountered in southeastern Kansas takes a
practiced eye and the time and patience to observe, notice and
appreciate subtleties in terrain, waterways, ground cover and
architecture. Most American coast-dwellers experience the Prairie
Plains (and the larger north-south Great Plains region, in general) from
either the window seat of an airplane or from the passenger seat of a
car or bus, zooming through the region along a crowded interstate
highway.

From this perspective, Kansas is just another state in the Fly-Over,
or Drive-By, Zone -- a flat, featureless place to pass through as
quickly as possible to get to more "dramatic" mountainous or urban
destinations to the West or East of the region. The state does not do
much to contradict this image, spending very little in advertising to
clue tourists in to the many worthwhile natural, historical, cultural
and culinary attractions waiting to be explored throughout the state.
So places celebrating Kansas' unique prairie landscape -- the Tallgrass
Prairie Preserve, in Strong City, or the Konza Prairie, in the Flint
Hills south of Manhattan -- generate little national or even regional
awareness. And the cars just drive right on by, to Denver, Dallas or
Kansas City, stopping only to refuel on gas and burgers at Kansas
Turnpike rest stops.

But to its original settlers, lured by often-exaggerated stories of
mammoth crop yields and rich, well-watered farmland, the Prairie Plains
of Kansas represented an agricultural promised land. A place for
immigrants from Prussia, Prague or Peoria to make a new start, with
cheap land, thriving towns and excellent railroad links to outside
markets.

A Typical Railroad Town, But Not a Ghost Town

Like many Kansas and Great Plains towns founded in the homesteading
heyday of the 1880s, Brainerd owed its very existence to the fact that a
railroad had decided to lay tracks and build a depot in a particular
place in the middle of the prairie. And as the railroad giveth, so does
the railroad taketh away -- a lesson abrubtly learned by many
Brainerd-like communities, which boomed, busted and then completely
disappeared. They often simply disintegrated into the prairie from
whence they sprang, as newer, better-connected towns popped up farther
down the line where the tracks of one railroad arbitrarily met up with
another.

"The rise of one [railroad town] and the fall of another was not a
remarkable event in the settlement of the American West," wrote
geographer John C. Hudson, in the introduction to Plains Country
Towns, his study of town planning and development in the Great
Plains. "By changing the characters, time and place, the same scenario
could be used to describe a sequence that took place hundreds, perhaps
thousands of times in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries."

The early history of Brainerd reads like a script from the screen
adaptation of Hudson's introduction. The town was founded along a major
East-West rail route. It boomed as a key farm-to-rail marketplace
center. Then it quickly shrank in status and population when a new
North-South railroad line decided to cross the existing grade three
miles to the Northwest at Whitewater, which lured Brainerd's key
businesses and influential residents with the promise of greater
economic opportunity and readier access to the outside world.

But Brainerd refused to die. Unlike many communities spurned by the
railroads which spawned them, Brainerd managed to hang on, somehow
making the transition from railroad boom town to stable farm town. In
this sense, it is unusual, especially when compared to the more than
6,000 "ghost towns," or "extinct geographical locations" chronicled in
the works of Kansas historian Daniel Fitzgerald.

"Ghost towns in Kansas are quite different from those in many other
western states," wrote Fitzgerald, in Ghost Towns of Kansas: A
Traveler's Guide. "Kansans have always found a use for lumber and
brick from deserted buildings; as a result, little remains of many of
the communities discussed in this book. The sites of many old towns
have been plowed or used as pasture by farmers. More often than not,
all that is left of a Kansas ghost town is dust and tumbleweeds;
imagination becomes the key."

Why Brainerd: My Personal Connection

My obsession
with Brainerd dates back to summer 1994. Escaping my cramped, railroad
flat New York City apartment on a muggy, overcast afternoon, I wandered
into a used book store on lower Fifth Avenue in search of something
different. My exhaustive ambulatory and literary exploration of
Manhattan and the outer boroughs had brought me to an intellectual and
emotional standstill. I figured that my ambivalent feelings about the
city, my increasingly tiresome advertising day job and my nebulous
future could use some sort of external spark. So, as I often do in
times of transition, I went out in search of something to read that
might awaken me from my current stupor.

I picked up two books that fateful July day that did just that: Ian
Frazier's Great Plains and Dayton Duncan's Out West: American
Journey Along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Neither one of these
popular non-fiction tomes purported to be works of groundbreaking
historical scholarship. However, both succeeded in filling me with a
hunger to see more of the Great Plains by placing the region in its
important historical context and eloquently describing the vastness of
the skies and prairie that greeted early explorers and settlers.

Something in Frazier's description of the whipping Plains winds
jogged my memory, and I got on the phone with my maternal Grandmother.
She confirmed the fact that she had spent most of her first five years
in a drafty, clapboard house in a little prairie town called Brainerd.
She regaled me with stories of her mother bringing the pigs and chickens
into the house to protect them from the cold Kansas winter, where the
wind blew so hard that sheets hung on the line to dry would get torn
asunder by the force of the incessant gales. Intrigued, I got out my
trusty Rand McNally atlas and found Brainerd, with some difficulty, on
the map of Kansas. It was not too far from McPherson, where my
great-grandfather on my father's side had attended college before
returning to his father's home town in Illinois to farm.

This Kansas connection continued to play out in my mind, as the hot,
wearisome summer wore on, and a variety of incidents came together to
convince me to quit my job, sublet my apartment, buy a used 1983 Toyota
Corolla and hit the Great American Road. I have told the story of the resultant three-month,
17,000-mile trip far too often elsewhere. But the most enduring
memories of the cross-country trek were the two days I spent puttering
around the empty spaces of Kansas: stumbling upon a sunlit, seemingly
deserted Brainerd for the first time; searching for my
great-great-grandfather's grave in McPherson at sundown; racing the moon
along the Santa Fe Trail to Dodge City; and driving through endless,
treeless stretches of mysterious western Kansas grasslands on a highway
(US 83) so empty that I could simultaneously pore over a map, down a cup
of coffee and snap the occasional photograph while maintaining a
constant speed of at least 55 miles per hour.

I was hooked on Kansas. For the rest of the trip, I kept pulling out
the photos I had snapped that Sunday afternoon when I drove quietly
along the narrow, empty sand and gravel streets of Brainerd.
Weatherbeaten, abandoned shacks and farm houses were juxtaposed against
a handful of newer ranch homes and adapted trailers, which hid behind
the shaggy trees and tall prairie grasses threatening to overtake the
small street network. Were it not for the shiny, hail-scarred grain
elevator still standing alongside the rusty railroad tracks parallel to
the highway, the whole community seemed on the verge of vanishing into
the trees and grasses -- at least on that quiet fall day in 1994.

I came back from the trip only to return to my old job, and the
journals and photos I had carefully logged on my trip gathered dust in
my closet for the next several years. But two cities and two jobs
later, my future wife and I landed in Kansas City, Mo., just a mile from
the Kansas/Missouri state line, and close enough for frequent
exploratory excursions to Brainerd and beyond. All told, I visited
Brainerd five times, and I spent many hours absorbing its documented
history through documents and maps I found at the Missouri Valley Room
at the Kansas City Public Library, the Kansas State Historical Society
in Topeka and in the Kansas Collection at the University of Kansas, in
Lawrence.

But it was only after I stumbled upon a short history of the
community at the State Historical Society and got in touch with its
author, lifelong Brainerd area resident Agnes Harder, that I really
began to learn and appreciate the stories and memories that are such a
crucial part of understanding this place.

The KU Connection: The Assignment

In fall 1998, I
returned to graduate school after a 10-year hiatus, with the intention
of completing an MA in American Studies, on a part-time basis, at the
University of Kansas. This site is the outgrowth of an assignment for
"Built Forms and Landscapes of the Great Plains," a joint American
Studies/Architecture course team-tought by KU professors Dennis Domer
and Mike Swann. The course syllabus focused on a study of built form in
the Prairie Plains of Eastern Kansas, in an attempt "to interpret the
landscapes of towns cities and rural areas ... so that we can learn more
about ourselves and what we value."

My study of Brainerd is an effort to add to this body of knowledge.
Professor Swann encouraged me to explore the topic by interviewing
several people who had grown up or lived for many years in Brainerd,
cataloging their memories of the landscape and townscape over time. By
combining these oral histories with other secondary and primary source,
he suggested, I could recreate the landscape of Brainerd through the
memories of its inhabitants, paying close attention to the common
themes, landmarks and events that appeared in the memories of each
interviewee.

All told, I interviewed four Brainerdites in person (all between the
ages of 65 and 89), and corresponded with several others by e-mail and
mail. Three of the interviewees who still live in the area walked and
drove the surrounding countryside and town streets with me, pointing out
the remains of key buildings, and identifying several newer structures
built from the remains of abandoned Brainerd homes and businesses. The
memories they shared with me revealed a keen, lot-by-lot awareness of
the small townscape's form and history. Clearly, their relationships to
the present-day Brainerd were intertwined with their remembrance of
Brainerds past, suggesting that collective memories of a very small
place like Brainerd may exert a sustaining force more powerful than the
economic engines that spawned and then abandoned the town.

Navigation Tips

To
continue this exploration of Brainerd, click
here, or use the frame at left to navigate to the beginning of the
History and Memories sections. Within each of these
sections, navigation follows a rather linear path, with links to the
previous and next pages in the narrative provided at the bottom of each
page.

The History and Memories sections include many links to current and
historic photos and maps and central to Brainerd's story. Clicking on
any of these links will launch a smaller, Gallery browser window
in front of your main browser. Once launched, this secondary browser
window will remain active until you close it or quit your browser. Each
time you click on a subsequent link to an image referenced in the text
of the History or Memories section, the image and text in this smaller
Gallery window will change accordingly. These images and their text
descriptions also can be viewed in the order in which they appear in the
narrative by clicking on the Previous or Next buttons at the bottom of
the Gallery window, or by linking directly to each image from the master
image directory, located on the main page of the Gallery section of the
site.

The Sources section contains a brief bibliography, links to
other related Web sites and some much-needed acknowledgements of
gratitude to those who helped me find the information and images that
brought this story to life.

Enjoy your visit, and please contact me via e-mail if you
have any questions, comments or suggestions. This is a living,
breathing history, and I welcome any additions or corrections that you
think would make this a more accurate and more useful site for fellow
students of Brainerd and the history of Kansas and the Prairie
Plains.